Performance Brake Pads – Key Characteristics

Hello everyone and welcome in this video really talking about performance brake pads and usually 7 key focus areas are one looking into brake pads call performance how performance how wide is that temperature range pad where ruder where due to the pet selection you make and then depending on the application noise and dust may matter as well.
So looking at a brake pad here us several things going on some common features you may see chamfer on the ends and that’s to improving gauge went and also help reduce break noise you also may have slots pretty much all of them will probably have slots on this is to help remove debris from the pad with the rotor wearing and also so that when you were Pat expands from heating up so much that prevents cracking within its who has a little bit of space to expand underneath you may have an under layer and there’s multiple roles this complain there can be multiple layers as well a base we’re gonna want to insulate your brake calipers so they don’t heat up your brake caliper about and then the heat up the brake fluid you wanna try and prevent that and also aids and bonding between the brake pad and the backing plate and then of course you have the backing plate and this helps hold the brake pad in place in your caliper so a performance change my go it is larger pants if you upgrade to a larger calipers one more pistons.

You can use larger pads so why would you want to use a larger pad well you’re gonna have reduced Pat we’re because you’ve got more material over all and you’re also going to have better fate characteristics because you’re distributing a sheet across a larger amount of material verses if you have a smaller Pat no one thing to note is that if you do use larger pads you’re gonna be covering up that section of the brake discs Iraq and have as much airflow over that section of the bravest and it could impact the cooling of the briga so it’s not always necessarily the best it’s not like you want just the massive caliper the goes all wait around the entire disc as you would have anywhere to reject the heat’s you do need some air flow but ultimately larger pants they’re gonna give you let’s Pat ware and better fit characteristics.
So there’s all kinds of materials out there that are gonna be used in brake pads I just listed a few ceramic expressed those which were no longer really used semi metallic Carmen Carmen some other examples there’s all kinds materials out there that’s not really that important for the consumer known as through about the material what’s more important is this graph right here.

Is the coefficient of friction verses the temperature of the pad. So as different pads are gonna have different characteristics allot of that due to the material selection. And so something like your family core you know it’s going to have a high coefficient of friction at basically low temperature so right and you get on the pad you know breaking as much in street cars as you are in a race and you’re not getting it to the highest temperatures so you won high called friction and then this performance kind of tapers off so if you go to a really long hill you can notice some brake fade in your cars that’s why they recommend using gearing to break your car because he’s brake pads will start to get too hot and then the coefficient friction drops dramatically and then you will really have that good of breaks.

So something used in racing will look very different where vehicle version of friction maybe very low it cold but that doesn’t matter because it once they get up to operating temperature that’s the range they’re gonna stay and throw the whole race so something that has you know depending on the race on how much breaking is involved you may want something that has better friction coefficients at a lower temperature or at a higher temperature something’s just very consistent throughout so they’ll be all kinds of different variations and actually the pad manufactures.

If you’re looking at buying these a lot of them will show you this graph so you can you know get the Pat exactly for the application that you want with you know there’s gonna be a ton of breaking and you want to be consistent you know getting something with a flatter curve at higher temperatures now with streetcars virtually one high coefficient friction at lower temperatures and that’s because you know your parents and your rotors are going to be getting that hut not stopping constantly so if you don’t the highway your rotors are essentially cold you know they’ve got a little bit of rubbing on him but really they’re not that warm and so you want to have that high friction immediately slipped away for them the warm up. And you can stop quickly so thank you for watching and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below.